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A little honesty. What adhesive bandage company doesn't WISH it had the brand power of Band-Aid®? You think Google™ doesn't on some level LOVE the fact that its brand name has become a verb synonymous with searching online?
In a post for AdsoftheWorld.com, Tom Parrette had some great advice for protecting your trademark, and keeping your brand from becoming genericized. But for nearly all the examples he cited, other than Xerox®, dilution also meant achieving god-like status within their categories. And ruling those categories ever since.
In The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding (Harper Colllins, 1998) Al and Laura Ries find genericizing a positive thing. “You know your brand owns the category name when people use your brand name generically.” But there’s a trick to balancing household name status with a continual hold on your category lock, and not every brand has succeeded.
The Rieses use Xerox® as an example. By extending the brand into things that didn’t make sense—“Xerox computers? No, Xerox is a copier.”—the company failed to reinforce the association they had built within their category. “When you try to tell customers that a brand is different than it used to be, they will reject your message,” the Rieses write.
Parrette’s post suggests combating dilution by extending the meaning of your brand to become a brand standard within a category. Perhaps a caveat needs to be added: extend where your equity fits and you’ll strengthen. Extend for the sake of extending, and risk Xerox’s fate.
Whether the Immutable Laws still hold a decade later can be debated, but consider this: genericized brands are less of a consumer issue than a brand management one.
Tags: brand dilution / 22 immutable laws of branding / al and laura ries / tom parrette / ads of the world